To Enter into Composition: A research on spectatorial relations and dramaturgical strategies that shape self- reflectivity in two contemporary participatory performances

Abstract

Abstract This thesis presents a research that questions how self-reflectivity is constructed and invited in two contemporary participatory performances: Guilty Landscapes – episode IV Pattaya by Dutch scenographer and theatre maker Dries Verhoeven and Remote Mitte by German art collective Rimini Protokoll. Self-reflection often occurs mainly inside one’s head. Hence, this research focuses on the personal experience of a single spectator, rather than the social aspect of participatory performances. In order to avoid assumptions, an auto-ethnographical writing method is used, meaning that analysis and arguments are based on my own subjective experiences of being a participating spectator. However, the use of a dramaturgical analysis as the research method avoids this thesis from getting too personal, by analysing dramaturgical structures and strategies regarding the performances’ composition, spectatorial address and contextual references. The first chapter of this thesis discusses spectatorial relations that I recognise to be important in the construction of spectatorial self-reflectivity, supported by literature of, among others, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, Claire Bishop and Gareth White. relation between the spectator and the procedural author, the spectator and the self and the Three relations, being the spectator and the other, have derived from Groot Nibbelink’s flexible performer-spectator- space constellation, that underlines the importance of analysing the performer’s and the spectator’s shared and shifting occupation of space. different dramaturgical strategies that each contribute to the constructing of the spectatorial Chapter Two and Three provide the reader with two separate dramaturgical analyses of the case studies, in order to set out relations and thus self-reflectivity. The fourth chapter offers a comparison of the two analyses and draws connections to previously described theories, to eventually answer the research question. This thesis argues that the foundational procedural structure of a performance, the use of digital media in the addressing of the spectator and references to socio-political themes and ethical dilemmas contribute to the construction and invitation of a self-reflective mode of spectatorship.